Li Huilin, Chien Jessie, Gutchess Angela, Sekuler Robert
Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, 415 South Street, MS 062, Waltham, MA, 02454, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2025 May 27. doi: 10.3758/s13414-025-03094-7.
Cultural differences in cognition, including visual perception and long-term memory, may arise because typical visual environments differ across cultures, particularly in their spatial scale. Consequently, the influence of culture on cognitive processing depends on whether stimuli are presented at a large or small spatial scale. We tested North American and East Asian young adults to determine whether such cultural differences extend to short-term memory-testing, for the first time, whether spatial frequency information contributes to cross-cultural differences in memory. Test materials were images of natural and constructed scenes whose spatial structure was manipulated by low-pass filtering. Several seconds after briefly viewing a target scene, a subject saw three versions of that scene: the target itself and two variants whose low-pass filtering differed from the target. From these three, the subject selected the image identical to the target. The two groups did not differ in overall recognition accuracy but did in the way they mistook nonmatching images for certain targets. Specifically, North American subjects made reliably fewer errors in matching images whose high-frequency content was intact, providing evidence that cultural differences in prioritization of high spatial frequency information extend to short-term memory. Across both groups, subjects were highly accurate at recognizing images that retained all or most of their high-spatial frequency content and were highly sensitive to different levels of spatial filtering. These findings show that visual memory has sufficient fidelity to support fine discrimination of variation in spatial frequency.
认知方面的文化差异，包括视觉感知和长期记忆，可能是由于不同文化中的典型视觉环境存在差异，尤其是在空间尺度上。因此，文化对认知加工的影响取决于刺激呈现的空间尺度是大还是小。我们对北美和东亚的年轻人进行了测试，以确定这种文化差异是否也适用于短期记忆测试，首次探究空间频率信息是否导致记忆方面的跨文化差异。测试材料是自然场景和人造场景的图像，其空间结构通过低通滤波进行了处理。在短暂观看目标场景几秒钟后，受试者会看到该场景的三个版本：目标场景本身以及两个低通滤波与目标场景不同的变体。受试者要从这三个版本中选出与目标相同的图像。两组在总体识别准确率上没有差异，但在将不匹配图像误认作某些目标的方式上存在差异。具体而言，北美受试者在匹配高频内容完整的图像时犯的错误明显更少，这表明在高空间频率信息优先级方面的文化差异延伸到了短期记忆。在两组受试者中，他们在识别保留了全部或大部分高空间频率内容的图像时都非常准确，并且对不同程度的空间滤波高度敏感。这些发现表明，视觉记忆具有足够的保真度来支持对空间频率变化的精细辨别。
